8 Weeks

Friday, September 14th, 2012. 8weeks.

I really didn’t think things would be so up in the air at eight weeks pregnant.

Honestly, I thought I would be announcing our happy news on Facebook at this point. I thought I’d spend the nights I’m alone while the husband is at work using my awesome new home fetal heart doppler to listen to my baby.

(Yeah. That bad boy came in the mail the day of our first ultrasound, by the way. It now resides in its unopened box under the bed, along with the pregnancy books, because I’m afraid to look at it.)

I really am in pregnancy limbo.

And I really hate limbo.

There is truly nothingI can do but wait, and that’s just not my style. Even Dr. Google has stopped giving me new information. Ugh.

I’ve started the dangerous path to over-rationalization, which is something I do when I’m very nervous or expecting a bad outcome.

I mentally go over my early pregnancy symptoms, and try to remember the days I had them and the days I didn’t. I try to pinpoint when they left, and match that up with the date Dr. K saw old blood in my uterus.

Was that the appropriate time frame for a miscarriage to have started? Did my baby stop growing a week ago, creating the blood that resulted in brown spotting this week?

All of these things can be completely unremarkable in a pregnancy.

Spotting? Happens to lots of people, and brown spotting is not of much concern.

Loss of symptoms? Hormone levels can plateau in any normal pregnancy, and sometimes symptoms fade in and out. No biggie.

Slow growth? It happens, and a lot of the time baby catches up. Early growth can be hard to gauge sometimes, especially with a tilted uterus.

All of these things alone can be perfectly normal.

All of these things together with my particular situation are extremely worrisome.

I am finding myself planning ahead on two separate paths…

On the one path, I am going ahead with that Facebook announcement. I’m registering and decorating a nursery and holding my new baby in the hospital.

On the other path, I’m making the decision whether to miscarry naturally or seek medical intervention. I’m grieving and healing and preparing to hop back on the TTC roller coaster.

It’s exhausting.

One thing I’ve decided though, is how I will proceed if I am forced down that second path. I can’t know what my body will do on its own, but I want to wait two more weeks before forcing anything to happen.

10 weeks pregnant. If the news is bleak at Tuesday’s ultrasound, then 10 weeks pregnant is as far as I will get.

Of course, there is still the small chance that maybe Gummy Bear decided to kick it into high gear this week and I’ll end up making it well past that 10 week mark… and down that first path after all.

I won’t lie, your first ultrasound scared me. But the second completely changed my mind. There was a big change, in that short amount of time. I have been googling like crazy this past week, looking up every single thing you have been posting. (and googling other ultrasound pics too) There are so many similar stories out there like yours, that end positive. Yeah, there are some negative ones too, but I swear there are so many more positives. You have already made it past 7 weeks, and that is pretty amazing 🙂

I know you’re right. I’m just as afraid to accept the stories that end well as I am the ones that end badly… I know I will have a really hard time handling the disappointment. It’s just a crappy place to be.

I mean, I keep saying to myself, “Self, you know that you and all of your siblings were small babies, and you know that the husband is kind of a small guy… Maybe Gummy Bear is taking after mom and dad!”

The same thing happened to a friend of mine- her baby was growing slowly and at one point was almost a week behind. They told her if he didn’t catch up by the next ultrasound she was going to miscarry. Miraculously, he did. I know every situation is different, but I wanted you to know there is definitely hope. I’m sorry you’re stuck on this sick rollercoaster – as if IF isn’t bad enough

This Is My Deal...

I'm Tracy. I'm a thirty-something, happily married miscarriage survivor, who tried just about everything possible to conceive for over five years, is currently parenting our miracle baby girl, and blogging about the hilarity of it all.

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A safe space where I discuss the racing thoughts in my head, personal struggles, and day-to-day activities while struggling with mental health and mood disorder issues. My personal goal is to reduce the stigma that comes with mental health and mood disorders, by talking more about it.